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How college students with disabilities can advocate for themselves

How College Students with Learning Disabilities Can Advocate for Themselves

by Linda G. Tessler, Ph.D., Psychologist, Bryn Mawr, PA

Speak up! Fight your own battles! When kids used to taunt in the schoolyard your friends would gather around to stick up for you. Now, on the college campus, it's your chance to stick up for yourself – fight for the accommodations that you require to succeed as a college student with learning disabilities. Through grade school and high school, your parents and your special education teachers fought for you. With your interests at heart, they spoke up on your behalf, helping you get the services you needed to thrive.

Now it is time for you to learn how to advocate for yourself, to support yourself, to reach your full potential in college, where there are large classes, less interaction with professors, and the expectation that you will manage your own study time. You must speak up! Here are some suggestions for easing the transition from depending on others to being your own advocate.

Know Your Rights

It's natural to feel uncomfortable discussing your learning disability and to worry about how professors will react. Perhaps they don't believe that learning disabilities even exist, or maybe they have a child with learning disabilities and completely understand your situation. In either case you are not alone. If you are planning to attend a college with an enrollment of 25,000 students, then approximately 350 of those students have learning disabilities, writes Howard Eaton in his book Self Advocacy. Remember that you are not asking for a favor: you are asking for a right that is guaranteed by the federal government. As a person with learning disabilities, you are entitled to receive certain accommodations. In fact, the American with Disabilities Act says, no discrimination should take place against anybody who is disabled. This includes persons with learning disabilities. Colleges are required to allow you an equal opportunity for success. Your job is to work hard to take advantage of that opportunity.

Know Yourself

To advocate for yourself and to deal with the inevitable roadblocks you'll face, you should understand what kind of disability you have so that you can explain it to others. How do you process information? What strategies work for you? Remember that a learning disability is a perceptual difference that inhibits intelligence from manifesting itself.

Be able to explain to the instructor what special kind of perceptual difference you have which inhibits your learning. Speak in terms of your strengths and weaknesses.

The list of accommodations that other students with learning disabilities have received is not a shopping list from which you can choose. You are entitled only to the help that allows you to use your accommodating techniques in order to overcome your disability.

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